Mesoamerica and the Spanish Conquest

Scholars have written on various aspects of Sor Juana's work that are
informed by the prehispanic past and by the exploration and conquest of
the New World. She wrote verses in Nahuatl, for instance, the language
spoken by the Aztecs. She also employed Native American characters in the
theological prologues to her sacred plays.

Where Hunger's Brides departs from the preponderance of scholarship
is in placing these themes at the very heart of her life and work.

Generally speaking, one or more of the following excerpts may provide
some interest to scholars or students investigating European representations
of the Conquest and New World - or the converse, views of Europe in the
New World. Sor Juana is of particular importance here, in being, arguably,
the only 17th-century artist of the first rank writing from a New World
perspective.

"Unstable
Margins" - We meet Sor Juana's grandfather, a Spanish veteran
of the Thirty Years' War who has settled in the mountains of Mexico.
He begins to teach the young prodigy about Cortés's forays in
the mountain pass above their hacienda - up to the volcano summits
to get ice and sulphur for his cannon. This, just before the descent
on the Mexica (Aztec) capital of Tenochtitlan.

"Abecedario" -
Juana learns that her wet nurse is descended from the wizard Martín
Ocelotl who, with his twin, Andrés Coatl, led an Indian uprising
against the Spaniards. In their rebellion against European domination
the brothers claimed to be incarnations of the gods Quetzalcoatl and
Tezcatlipoca. The rebels were eventually arrested by the Inquisition.

"Fire-bow" -
Juana's grandfather compares the Council of Music (for the study of art,
astronomy, medicine, literature and history) founded by the poet-emperor
Nezahualcoyotl, c.1428, to its contemporary, the Florentine Academy of
the Medicis.

"Snake Woman" comprises
a series letters to Sor Juana from the Mexican savant Carlos de Sigüenza
y Góngora - mathematician, astronomer, historian, collector and
interpreter of Aztec codices. Don Carlos writes from the jungle where
he and a group of Franciscans have discovered a remote village in which
many of the ancient practices survive. The chapter roughly parallels
the ground-breaking ethnographic work of a few distinguished Churchmen
such as Sahagún and Durán. (Mentions: syncretism, the Virgin
of Guadalupe, Aztec cosmology, eucharistic rites, native herbology and
technologies, comparisons of ancient Egypt with America, a lost codex
concerning Cortés's translator Malintzin.)

There exists a suite of chapters that establish links - poetically,
rather than by argumentation - between the decline and fall of the Aztec
empire and that of Spain, a decline apparent in the Spanish dominions
by the end of Sor Juana's lifetime. By 1692, the Valley of Mexico seemed
almost to be falling beneath the spell of the same uncanny events that
had ushered in the destruction of great Tenochtitlan. Comets, eclipses,
flood, blight, infestations, strange births, rebellion. One such chapter
is Sor Juana's letter to her friend, the scientist Carlos de Sigüenza: "Feeding
the Sun".